They had tramped into the country the day before, spent the night in four wonderful beds in an old inn that might have harbored some of Sir Francis Drake’s men at the time of the Armada, and were now due at the wharf in a few hours.
Life aboard a destroyer or an American submarine chaser in foreign service is not very pleasant if it is exciting. The space for sleeping, for instance, on these fast vessels is scarcely greater than that assigned to the crews of submarines. As Ikey Rosenmeyer, who possessed a riotous imagination, had said at the inn:
“Oi, oi! sleeping in a real bed again is better than bein’ at home in Ireland, and Frenchy says that’s heaven ’cause his mother came from there. Why, it is better’n heaven! You could spread out your legs and wiggle all your toes without havin’ the master-at-arms down on you like a thousand of brick.”
Frenchy, in a dreamy and poetic mood, not infrequent when the romantic Irish blood in his veins was stirred, was gazing off over the sea at the fogbank.
“Think of it,” he murmured, “How many hundred an’ thousan’ of ships have sailed out of this harbor into just such a fogbank as that—”
“And never came back,” interrupted Torry. “Some tough old gobs, the ancient British seamen, boy.”
“‘Tough’ is right,” chuckled Frenchy, his poetic feelings exploded. “And they haven’t got over it yet. They’ve got old-timers in the British Navy now that can remember when the cat was used on the men’s backs, reg’lar.”
“And every British sailor had tar on his breeches—that’s why they used to call ’em ‘brave British tars,’” scoffed Torry. “Can it! These English chaps are all right. They aren’t much different from us garbies.”
“Is that so?” exclaimed Ikey, whose sharp eyes allowed little to escape them. “What kind of a deep-sea crab do you call this comin’ down the road right now, I want to know?”
Phil Morgan paid no attention to what his mates were talking about. The peaceful English landscape charmed his eye.